The subject matter discussed in the background section should not be assumed to be prior art merely as a result of its mention in the background section. Similarly, a problem mentioned in the background section or associated with the subject matter of the background section should not be assumed to have been previously recognized in the prior art. The subject matter in the background section merely represents different approaches, which in and of themselves may also correspond to embodiments of the claimed subject matter.
The advent of modern computing, networking, Internet connectivity, and E-Commerce has brought innumerable benefits to society; however, these technologies have also introduced new risks and have opened up new opportunities for fraud and malicious attack.
Attackers continuously develop ever more sophisticated technologies and techniques by which they may perpetuate their fraud. Individuals and technology service providers must therefore provide ever improved counter-attacks resulting in a technological arms race as each party, friendly and foe, strives to gain technological superiority over the other. As more and more services transition from client-server based technology to “cloud computing” type technologies, the risks are amplified as increasing amounts of sensitive information is stored remotely from a user's own local and physically controlled computing hardware. For instance, unlike a user's locally stored information which is available online only intermittently and is just one target among countless others, a “cloud service” offers potential attackers a centralized location representing and providing the data of many users, and which is always accessible via a public Internet according to its own design.
Conventional techniques routinely require a user of such technology services to affirm their identity when requesting access to services, for example, by providing a “user name” and a “password.” Unfortunately, such simple mechanisms are widely understood to be insufficient without additional safeguards. More sophisticated security mechanisms are desirable to better safeguard both service providers and their users against a variety of attacks, including those associated with viruses, malware, phishing, man-in-the-middle attacks and others.
The present state of the art may therefore benefit from the systems, apparatuses, and methods for implementing cryptographic enforcement based on mutual attestation for cloud services as described herein.